Preparing for the worst in this profession means work and save your money as much as you possibily can, because every 10 years, more or less, we get hit by a crisis that lasts for few years. If you are young enough or not and can think of a second way to make a good living go for it.

Here's my take on your question -- admittedly taking the long-view.

Back when I was in graduate school, I spent some time trying to understand the primary determinant for the demand in construction ... i.e. what pushes the economy (and micro-economies) to need additional buildings. In hindsight, the answer was pretty obvious: population growth.

However, the data actually does supports that conclusion -- if you look at the US Economy over a fairly long period of time (in my case, I went back to the end of WW2) you see that there's a very strong correlation between population growth and the inflation adjusted growth in the value of new construction put-in-place.

Take a look at this link: US Population Growth

While the data on construction is notoriously difficult to use over long periods of time (because the government keeps changing the way it assembles and presents the data) if one goes back and looks at the growth of construction volume, say from 1964 through 2002, one sees the following inflation adjusted growth rates:

Total new construction: 0.78% per year, on average
Total private residential buildings: 0.91% per year, on average
Total private non-resldential buildings: 0.64% per year, on average
Total public buildings: 0.97% per year, on average

Admittedly, there can be some very wild short-term swings in these numbers, as we're witnessing now. However, the long-term trends remain relatively consistent. If a country like the US is experiencing population growth, there will be a comparable increase in the amount of new construction put-in-place. Similarly, when there are significant population shifts within a country (such as occurred during the migration of population in the US from the industrialized northeast and northcentral parts of the US to the "sunbelt") construction trends will follow population trends.

I had a mentor once who loved to say "architects need a robust construction economy" ... cleary, given what we're going through right now, that is true. However, if you look beyond our current problems to the future, once can take reasonable comfort that the construction economy will rebound and we will once again get busy -- probably overbusy -- as the demand for new buildings, and the remodeling of existing buildings, tries to keep up with population growth.

Purpurina has it right -- if one is to be an architect, one must prepare oneself for the cyclical nature of the profession. Nobody's going to do it for you -- you must do it for yourself.